by Holly Smale
The driver clears his throat.
“In love, Goldilocks?” He winks at me in the rear-view mirror, waving his hand in my direction. “That explains a lot.”
I look in surprise at the anatomically correct heart I’ve been sketching on the window, and then blush and wipe it away. Subtle, Harriet.
“Nope,” I say as nonchalantly as I can. “I’m just … prepping for next year’s biology module.”
“Course you are.” The driver grins. “Anyway, thought you was in an ’urry? Some kind of exam?” He nods. “You got four minutes left.”
I blink a few times. The car has stopped and we’re sitting directly outside my school. I hadn’t even noticed we’d stopped moving.
“But …” I say as I scrabble in my satchel for my purse, “how is that even physically possible?”
The driver shrugs. “I’m magic, ain’t I,” he states matter-of-factly. “Like that fat dude in ’Arry Potter.”
I glance up. He certainly looks … other-worldly. Ephemeral. Slightly over-blessed with body hair.
“And I went well over the speed limit,” he adds brightly. “That’s eighty quid, love. Magic is pricy these days. Now get a hop on, you got three minutes left.”
swear on my Oxford English Dictionary, I have never moved so fast in my entire life.
By the time I’ve slid through the closing door of the gym hall, my breathing is so strained I sound like our vacuum cleaner when Annabel’s cleaning the sofa. Sweat is dripping down my neck and the only thing I have to mop it up with is the edge of my school jumper now hanging in three ripped pieces around my neck, like a piece of modern art. Or something Wilbur would wear.
I’m barely two steps into the room when Toby’s fluffy head spins around. I can only assume he spotted me out of the back of it with what he calls his ‘Harrietenna’.
“Toby,” Miss Johnson says in a warning voice, and Toby immediately stops waving and starts blowing me kisses and blinking instead.
I nod hello at him, hurry past and put my little plastic bag of stationery carefully on the right-hand side of my desk. Then I sit down and close my eyes.
Only a minute left to gather my thoughts, summon The Knowledge of the Stickers and Zen my environment. Just a few precious moments to allow the stress hormones to dissipate, to regulate my breathing, stop working out what time it is in Australia and to get my mind back on physics.
Midnight. It’s midnight in Sydney right now.
Somebody snorts.
Focus, Harriet. There are two types of electron: negative and positive. Like charges repel. Opposite charges attract.
Somebody snorts again, and there’s a faint giggle from a few seats away.
When insulating materials are rubbed together, electrons are knocked off one atom and on to the other.
There’s another laugh, and suddenly I’m vaguely aware of eyes burrowing into my forehead.
Not just Toby’s, I know what they feel like.
Cautiously, I open mine and glance around the room. There are a hundred and fifty-two other students in the hall, and every single one of them is staring at me.
I have absolutely no idea why. It’s not as if nobody here has seen sweat before. Or a ripped jumper. Or a single sock and scratched face. That’s how a large chunk of my year end lunch break.
I look at Toby and see he’s inexplicably patting his cheeks. When I search the room for Nat and see her – a long way away – she’s trying to mouth something at me.
“Go,” she’s saying, subtly pointing at me. “Go.”
I love Nat. She’s my favourite person in the entire world (followed by my dad and Annabel). But I’m not going anywhere. I’ve only just got here.
“Go,” she mouths again, and then she rolls her eyes and smacks her head with her hand.
Now that gesture I’m familiar with.
“Everybody face this way,” Miss Johnson shouts furiously, and three hundred and two eyes suddenly snap away from my face. “Toby Pilgrim, that includes you,” Miss Johnson yells, and the final two revert to the front. “You have thirty seconds before your exam begins.”
The only person not focusing on our imminent exam is Alexa, who is sitting diagonally directly behind me. She’s got a standard smug expression on her face and she’s rolling something between her fingers. Before I can work out what’s going on, she subtly leans down and rolls a little paper ball forward so it’s positioned directly under my desk.
“Twenty seconds.”
I stare at the ball in confusion, then in a flash I know: Alexa’s trying to sabotage my exam. She’s trying to plant revision notes on me. Yet another round of her ultimate plan – Ruin Harriet’s Life.
Oh my God. If I pick it up and get caught, I’m going to be thrown out of this exam. If I don’t pick up it up and it gets found under my desk afterwards, I’ll get disqualified for cheating. What do I do?
“Ten seconds.”
Pick it up or don’t pick it up? Don’t pick it up or pick it up?
“Five seconds.”
I bend down swiftly and grab it. If I can destroy the evidence before the exam starts, I’m not cheating. I’m just … disposing of rubbish responsibly.
But, like Pandora, I need to know what’s in the box. I need to know what’s intended to destroy me. So I tuck the note under the desk and quietly open it:
GEEK, YOU’RE FACE IS BRIGHT GOLD.
Oh, I think.
Oh.
“Please turn your papers over,” Miss Johnson announces as I shrink into my seat with my hands over my face. “You may now start.”
spend the rest of my final exam looking like something actresses hold once a year and cry over. According to a test I did on the internet, I have 143 IQ points. Clearly I have no idea what to do with any of them.
Toby isn’t quite so sure.
“Harriet,” he says happily as I walk out of the hall and head outside to wait for Nat. “I am honoured to stalk you. I honestly cannot think of anyone I’d rather follow obsessively around.”
Somehow, Toby’s gotten even more thin and stretched-out looking: as if he’s a bit of melted cheese somebody’s just pulled off a pizza. His hair is fluffier, he has dark shadows around his eyes, and he’s bobbing along with his hands neatly by his sides, his little nose twitching slightly. He looks even more like a meerkat than he did last time you saw him.
Let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t be even vaguely surprised if a plane flew past and he bolted for cover.
“What are you talking about, Tobes?”
“Gold is traditionally the colour of success, achievement and triumph,” Toby explains in a voice brimming over with admiration. “You’re the perfect colour for the last exam. I don’t know why nobody has thought of it before.”
I stare at him, and then burst into an explosion of laughter. Only Toby could possibly think I painted myself gold today on purpose.
Except … In love, Goldilocks? That explains a lot.
I abruptly stop laughing. Oh my God: the taxi driver did too. I clearly just look like the kind of girl who goes insane and colours herself in on a regular basis.
That’s not the impression I’m trying to give to the world at all.
As Toby starts chattering excitedly about exam questions and oscillations of light waves, I glaze over and listen to the sound of his chirpy words going up and down and round and round.
Every time I try to remember what it was like not having him around, I can’t do it. Toby’s like a fact: once you know him, you can’t unknow him. Over the last few months, he’s started spending a little more time where Nat and I don’t have to pretend we can’t see him. And we’ve…
Well, we’ve kind of let him.
He’s not so bad in small doses. As long as he doesn’t irritate Nat too much. She has limited interest in irrelevant facts, and I fill that quota already.
We finally get outside, blink a few times in the bright sunshine, then start wandering, half blind, towards a small patch of shade. Nat’s surname is ne
ar the beginning of the alphabet, so she always gets stuck at the back of an exam room: picking at her nail varnish and making impatient huffing sounds, like a pretty, swishy-haired dragon.
By the time we spot Alexa it’s too late.
She’s just outside the school gates with a big group of her friends: all clad in their cunningly edited school uniforms like a fashionable army. Rolled skirts and tucked tops and pink streaks and bra-straps showing. Sprawled menacingly across the grass, as if they own the school.
And how can I put this?
In a very non-literal way, they sort of do.
o, by the way.
If you think a polite but firm conversation with my bully six months ago totally fixed everything between us, you’ve obviously never met Alexa. Or me.
Or any other teenage girl.
I want to pretend Alexa and her friends aren’t waiting for me, but a quick glance at her face tells me otherwise. She’s practically salivating. That’s the not-so-great thing about the last day of school: no repercussions.
“Hey,” she says sharply, taking a step towards me. “Manners.”
I instinctively look for another exit. But, short of using Toby to hurdle the fence, there’s no other way out of the school. So I duck my head and try my hardest to become completely invisible.
Thanks to not being a member of the Fantastic Four, this doesn’t work.
“HEY,” Alexa says again, blocking my path. She glances briefly at Toby. He scratches at the inside of his ear and then sniffs his finger. “Did you have fun in that exam, geek? Bet you did. I bet it was the best fun you’ve had in ages.”
I flush slightly. She’s absolutely right: it was awesome. When I got to the essay question about the life cycle of a star, I actually got a bit dizzy with excitement. “Maybe,” I say with the most non-committal shrug I can muster.
“Bet you knew all the answers, didn’t you, you total spod.”
I shake my head. “Only about ninety-three per cent of them.”
Everyone snickers – I don’t know why: that’s still a solid A* – and Alexa scowls at me. I try to walk away, but she blocks me again. “So you’ve heard about the massive house party I’m having tonight?”
The answer to this question is obviously: yes. There are Eskimos in Siberia who woke up this morning, fully aware of the house party Alexa is having tonight.
“No.”
“I’ve heard about it,” Toby interrupts eagerly. “You’re having tiny jellies, aren’t you? Alexa, they sound brilliant. I’ve always found normal-sized jellies unhygienic. All those different spoons. It’s much more sanitary to have lots of little ones each, isn’t it?”
Alexa ignores him. “A guy who used to be on TV is coming. So it’s technically a celebrity party.”
Toby nods sagely. “No green jelly then. Just awesome red and purple, right? My mum makes mine in the shape of a rocket with liquorice where the engines would be.”
Years from now, historians will look back at records of these days and wonder how Toby managed to get through them alive.
“That’s nice for you, Alexa,” I say, finally managing to dodge round her and start walking in the opposite direction.
“So, Manners” – and she clears her throat – “Want to come?”
I stop mid-stride. Apparently when people have their heads cut off there are five or six seconds when they can hear and see and blink, but they can’t move because they’ve already been severed in half.
That’s sort of how I feel now.
Slowly, I turn back round. “Pardon me?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Nat come out of the school doors, pause and then start legging it towards us.
“Do you want to come to my party?” Alexa says, her face totally blank. “We’ve got a TV star, so you’d be the perfect celebrity addition. A model.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she says slowly, and the smirk appears again. “And if we fancy a dance, we can tie you to the ceiling by your feet and spin you round really fast. You can be our very own human disco ball.”
Then she points at my face and bursts into hysterical laughter, and a few nano-seconds later everyone starts snickering behind her.
It takes thirty minutes for a human body to produce enough heat to boil half a gallon of water. I think from the temperature of my cheeks right now I can probably cut that down to eleven or twelve, maximum.
Why didn’t I just keep walking? What’s wrong with me? Other than a gold face and an entire lack of survival instinct, obviously.
“Bite us, Hockey-legs,” Nat snaps, suddenly appearing next to me. “As if we’d want to go to your wannabe party.”
“As if I’d want you to want to. I’m still scrubbing the loserness off my doorstep from your last visit.” Alexa sneers. “Anyway, why the hell would I want her,” and she points at me like I’m a bit of toenail stuck in a carpet, “in my house, spreading her geekiness around? There’s no level of cool that can cure that. I’d have an epidemic on my hands.”
She spins round and adds, “Nobody wants that, right?” Then starts ceremoniously high-fiving her friends.
As if I’m not still standing there with my cheeks burning.
As if I don’t matter.
As if I never will.
As if nothing has changed at all.
count slowly to ten, and then I take a deep breath, reach into my pocket and pull out a small bit of crumpled-up paper.
I tap my still-triumphing nemesis on the back and hand it to her.
“What the hell is this?”
YOUR
GEEK, YOU’RE FACE IS BRIGHT GOLD.
“You-apostrophe-r-e is a contraction of you are, Alexa,” I say. “If you needed help with grammar, you should’ve asked.”
There’s a stunned silence followed by a couple of desperately suppressed snorts, and I suddenly wonder whether everyone likes Alexa as much as they pretend they do. Or whether some of them are only here for the ‘celebrity’ parties and tiny jellies.
Alexa’s smirk has finally gone. “I know the difference,” she hisses furiously. “It was a typo.”
She scrunches the distinctly handwritten note back up and throws it hard at my face. It hits my left ear with a small pop.
“What do I care, anyway?” she adds. “School’s over. Nobody in real life cares about that kind of rubbish.”
“I do,” I say quietly.
“So do I,” Nat says loudly, putting her arm around my waist and giving me a quick peck on the cheek.
“Me too,” Toby agrees. “Never underestimate the power of a well-placed apostrophe.”
We turn to leave and Alexa suddenly loses it, as if all her anger has just exploded in one bright firework of hatred. “Don’t walk away from me, geeks!” she screams, slamming her hand against a parking bollard. “We’re not done here! You just wait until next year! I’m going to … I’m going to – you – you – you’re …”
“Hey!” Toby says, “I think she’s finally getting it, Harriet!”
“We’ll look forward to hearing the rest of that sentence in sixth form, Alexa,” Nat calls back. “That should give you enough time to work out something really terrifying.”
We grin at each other and keep walking. Alexa’s shouting gets fainter and fainter until all I can hear is a harmless buzzing sound, like a tiny mosquito.
I look upwards.
The sky is bright blue, the trees have parted, and now there’s nothing but summer stretching endlessly in front of us.
e don’t even wait until we turn the corner to start dancing.
That’s the beauty of the summer holidays. It’s as if life is just a big Etch-A-Sketch, and once a year you get to shake it vigorously up and down and start again. By the time we go back to school, the whole year will be wiped clean.
Sort of.
Enough to ensure nobody remembers Toby breakdancing across the road with his satchel on his head, anyway.
“Did you see Alexa’s face?” Nat
shouts, doing a little scissor kick and punching the air. “That was magic.”
I give a happy little hop, even though it does mean I may now have to apply to a different sixth form if I don’t want to spend the rest of my teens lodged down a toilet of Alexa’s choosing. (The Etch-A-Sketch isn’t that thorough.) “Do you think I did something horrendous to Alexa when we were little that I’ve forgotten about, Nat?”
“Who cares if you did?” Nat yells as she does a series of excited little spins, high-fiving me on every turn. “Alexa’s gone! Exams are over. Do you know what that means?! No more physics! No more chemistry! No more history! No more MATHS!”
My A Levels will be in physics, chemistry, history and maths and I fully intend to start studying for them before the week is over, but I high-five my best friend anyway.
Nat giddily grabs a calculator out of her bag and throws it on the floor. “I am never going to use you again,” she yells at it. “Do you understand? Me and you: we’re through!”
Toby bends down and picks it up. “Aren’t you going to study fashion design, Natalie?”
“Yup.” She tosses her shiny black hair and beams at him. “It’s going to be clothes, clothes, clothes for the rest of my life.”
“Then you’re going to need this,” Toby says, handing it back to her. “To calculate fabric measurements, body shapes, profit margins, manufacturing costs and loan repayments, not to mention pattern cutting and size differentiation.”
“What?” Nat’s face collapses. “Oh for the love of …” She looks at me. “I didn’t have to know that for months. Seriously. Does he have to be here? Can’t we send him back to wherever he came from?”
“Hemel Hempstead,” Toby says helpfully. “I can get the 303 bus.”
“We’ve got an entire summer ahead of us,” I remind Nat jubilantly, ignoring him. I feel a bit like Neil Armstrong immediately before he boarded the Apollo in 1969: as if we’ve just been handed all the space in the universe, and we can do whatever we want with it. “In fact, I’ve got it all mapped out.” I start rummaging in my satchel and then pull out a piece of paper with a flourish. “Ta-da!”